All At Sea With The Romans

I got my ancient galleys out on Sunday and what started as 'I'll have a quick game to try out something' turned into a three commands a side big battle (in Galleys & Galleons terms, anyway). 

What I wanted to do was try out some Romans, using their legendary corvus boarding bridge. Now it's possible that this wasn't used for that long, if at all, but for the purposes of the game I let them have it. Now Galleys & Galleons does have specific rules for the corvus, but I've always thought that they were a bit clunky and didn't fit the general elegance of most of the game's mechanisms. And it's easy enough to create an acceptable facsimile of one using existing traits anyway.

Naturally the Romans were up against their traditional arch-enemies, the Carthaginians. I gave both sides six quinqueremes, six quadremes and four triremes, split into three commands. I semi-randomised the distribution of ships to make things interesting.

The Carthaginian ships were straight out of the rules, aside from the quadremes simply being Q3 C3 with ramming (as per previous games I've played) and their triremes having expert oarsmen.

The Roman triremes were given drilled soldiers. The quadremes and quinqueremes dropped ramming and added swashbucklers and drilled soldiers. So they were exceptionally good at boarding*.

Here's the two sides set up. The Roman ships are red and green and are on the right. Any other colour is Carthaginian. You can see the rough division of the fleets into commands.

Here's the position a couple of turns in. Close to the island opposing triremes are approaching each other.

And that's where the fighting started; a Carthaginian trireme rammed its Roman counterpart.

However the Romans boarded and evened things up.

More fighting and ramming.

On the other flank quadremes and quinqueremes faced off. The Romans inflicted a few hits with artillery as they approached.

In the centre the Carthaginians got the initiative and rammed the Romans. They got a cuple of lucky hits which crippled opposing quinqueremes.

Battle was joined all along the line. With little sea-room the fighting was close and there was little maneuver to speak of.

A Carthaginian quadreme struck on the left, after teh Romans boarded. But the Romans were suffering hits as well.

Intense fighting in the centre. A Carthaginian quadreme hit the red Roman quadreme in the centre of the picture, sinking it.

It sliced through the wreck and rammed one of the Roman command vessels as well.

You can see a few sunken ship markers now.

One of the Roman command vessels strikes.

The Roman flagship was now under attack. 

It was all too much for the Romans. I gave each ship a points value - 2 for triremes, 3 for quadremes and 4 for quinqueremes. This gave a total of 50 for each side. I considered a side defeated if it took 25 points of losses or more. The Romans reached 27 points. The Carthaginians had lost a mere 7.

The Romans were comprehensively defeated in what was, given the number of ships involved, a relatively short action. They certainly had the edge when it came to boarding, but the Carthaginians got some good rams in early on and the Romans never really got into the fight properly. However it was interesting to try two different fighting styles in this era and I'd like to give it another try with, maybe, fewer ships and more sea-room.

*If you subscribe to the view that the corvus made the ships unstable you could add the sluggish disadvantage and add in iron grapples. I  didn't.